Was It Racism or Desire for Authoritarian Leadership That Elected Trump? The Right Answer Is Both

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an election in which there was so much disagreement after the fact about what led to the result. The postmortems are endless this time and we don’t seem to be getting any closer to a consensus. It’s understandable that people would be intensely curious to figure out why there was such a pronounced and unprecedented split between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College. That has been an exceedingly rare occurrence — in the era of popular elections, it happened only once before 2000 — that is suddenly the norm for Republican presidential victories. Something isn’t working quite right in our democracy, and it stands to reason that people would want to find out what it is.